"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

The Obama Video

I don't have much to say about the video of Obama posted last night by The Daily Caller and discussed on Hannity, which shows him addressing an audience of black ministers at Hampton University in 2007. I think it is newsworthy, in large part because it highlights the degree to which the mainstream media selectively "whitewashed" Obama in the 2008 election campaign by airbrushing out the less savory aspects of his political background, including Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and, here, a race-baiting speech. But it doesn't tell me much that I didn't already know:

1. Obama is our first "tribal President." By this I mean: I am certain that he thinks of himself as a "black American" rather than as an "American." I do not believe we have ever had until now a President who thought of himself as being defined by his ethnicity. It does not bode very well for the future of a multiracial country if this mode finds success.

2. Obama believes America is fundamentally evil due to its past treatment of blacks. On one level, I can understand this. On the other hand, America's treatment of slaves and blacks under Jim Crow has absolutely nothing to do with Obama, whose father was a black intellectual from Africa who never became a U.S. citizen, and whose mother was, as the libs say about Mitt Romney, "the whitest white woman" you can imagine.

3. Obama believes racism is still an important motivation of Americans who disagree with liberal policies. In this he has simply adopted the cliched and lazy intellectual categories of the modern academia, where every issue is viewed through the prisms of race, class and gender.

4. Finally, Obama's beliefs regarding America's racism are essentially fake, a persona he adopted in Ivy League colleges and law school to gain credibility as a spokesman for downtrodden minorities, despite the fact that he was raised by a white mother in Indonesia and Hawaii, suffered little or no racial discrimination, and had substantial privileges and opportunities (prep school and Ivy League educations) that most Americans, white or black, cannot hope to have. The faux cadences of the black preacher, the faux Southern black dialect, the faux religiosity from a man whom, I am certain, is an atheist... they are nothing new, and have frankly become a cliche of the left. That they are themselves racist -- that Obama thinks he has to talk down to a black audience -- will never be recognized by the mainstream media, but it's obvious to me.

So, like I said: nothing new. Maybe there are people out there who can be moved by seeing Obama in a new light, but those people are probably such low information voters that they won't have been watching Hannity last night, and certainly won't be reading the Daily Caller.

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About Me

I am a husband and a father all the time.
During the day, I am an attorney, specializing in large-scale commercial litigation.
In politics, I am a big "R" Republican and a little "d" democrat, meaning I believe in people more than government.
In sports, I am a lover of the St. Louis Cardinals, the Green Bay Packers, and the Duke Blue Devils.
I was once an English professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, before I grew out of it.
I used to be a Protestant. Then I was a typical over-educated pretentious agnostic. Then I became a semi-Catholic, meaning that my wife is Catholic, my children are Catholic, and I was waiting for lightning to strike. Now I am just a plain old Catholic. Like Chesterton, I wanted to found my own heresy, to be in advance of the age, in advance of the truth. And I found that I was two thousand years behind it.